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The digital world of work is here and organisations are having to adopt a flexible staffing strategy.

According to Deloitte’s 2017 survey on The Rules of The Digital Age, 81% of businesses that responded found “talent acquisition and management” as the second most important challenge they faced. From the on-going digitisation and automation of recruitment processes to managing work-life balance as well as the need by workers for increased flexibility, businesses across numerous industries must find new ways to efficiently cope with a complex set of ever-changing needs.The digital world of work is here and organisations are having to adopt a flexible staffing strategy.

Taking a flexible, on-demand staffing strategy can have a direct impact on a business’s overall performance, especially when dealing with peaks and troughs in demand, which can result in companies being either “understaffed” or “overstaffed”. The hospitality, events, retail or even office sectors are no different and all experience such fluctuations when it comes to their monthly personnel and business requirements. However, despite these facts, the majority of organisations in these sectors have retained a rigid staffing model, preventing them to reach their “Powerzone” – the optimum balance of personnel resources and business requirements that allows them to reach maximum return and save on staffing cost inefficiencies.

To ensure businesses are able to call upon flexible staff to deal with their variable peaks in demand, at Coople we have a devised a “Just-in-time” model, which allows employers to bring in various layers of flexible staff at any one time. With a “core team” and “support team” making the majority of a business’ full-time staff, we have observed a need for our clients to rely on a variety of flexible teams to ensure they can deliver the best quality of service to their customers without incurring excessive costs.

Built with key employees who are tightly bound to the company and have a permanent contract, the “Core & Support team” typically consists of the senior management team and core managers. Employees belonging to the “internal flex workforce” tend to have a permanent working contract but are part of a wider staffing pool which can be used for variable assignments that change depending on seasonality or other demand fluctuations.  The “extended internal flex team” on the other hand do not have a permanent agreement but tend to know the company well and are key in training and liaising with the “external flex team”, ensuring these flexible workers are in sync with the organisation’s culture and modus operandi.

Having a flexible and layered “Just-in-time” staffing approach has enabled a number of Coople’s clients to deal with a wide set of staffing challenges – from busy lunchtime breaks to bad weather and staff sickness. Ensuring each team is strongly linked to the organisation’s “core team” and its culture, this on-demand approach enables businesses to deploy their flex-teams at very short notice (hours/ minutes) to deal with unpredictable and ever-changing business needs.

By building a pool of workers on the Coople platform, employers are able to create a shortlist of their favourite workers for them to re-hire instantly, making the hiring process frictionless. Beyond flexible work requirements, companies are also looking at digital tools to help them better manage their entire staffing needs across planning cycles, uploading their own staff to analyse and better identify staffing needs.

This data-driven planning and recruitment approach is already changing the way companies work, by allowing them to easily and efficiently tackling their staffing needs. By using intuitive digital tools such as Coople’s on-demand staffing platform businesses can look to optimise both profitability and customer satisfaction at the same time with minimal overhead and admin time spent on managing recruitment, payroll and other related tasks.